Designer Salary:

To get an idea of what designers make, you have to break down “designer” into categories. There are as many different mean salaries as there are types of designer, so Indeed’s figure of approximately $63,000 as a mean “designer” salary is somewhat obsolete. You must break down “designer” into categories to understand what designers make. Thus, Graphic Designers, perhaps the first thing people think of when they think of a kind of designer, earn a mean annual wage of approximately $60,000 per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Web and Digital Interface Designers (the BLS lumps Web and UX/UI Designers into one category) earn a mean annual salary in the neighborhood of $95,000. Industrial Designers pull in about $80,000 per annum on average, while what the BLS terms “Special Effects Artists and Animators,” a group that includes Game Designers, are paid a mean salary in the vicinity of $86,000. Interior Designers earn an annual wage of approximately $63,000, while Floral Designers earn a modest $32,000 yearly. 

Salary figures vary considerably from one type of designer to another; you’d therefore do well to consult the BLS’ (or other reliable) figures before committing to a career path. Given the ranges quoted above, you should also learn to keep your eyes open for opportunities that can launch you toward the upper ends of the salary spectrum.

What is a Designer?

A designer is a person who comes up with designs—plans, drawings, schematics, renderings, and prototypes—of just about anything you may encounter in today’s world. Everything from a shampoo bottle to the outsides of airplanes had to be designed before they could become tangible realities. The designer is often the person who comes up with the idea for something and then comes up with the plans for it. Designers are idea people and creative types who possess the ability to see things that don’t exist (yet).

Designers come in as many shapes and sizes as the objects they design. You’ll thus encounter everything from Floral Designers to Mechanical Designers and Graphic Designers to UX/UI Designers. Each field requires specialized knowledge, but the threads connecting all of them are a creative spirit and artistic ability. Much designing today is done on the computer, using CAD (computer-assisted design) software, but the good old-fashioned ability to draw is still an essential tool in most designers’ toolkits.

Read more about what a designer does.

What Affects Your Pay as a Designer

Designer salaries vary considerably, both between and within specializations. The two most apparent factors that impact how much goes into a designer’s pay envelope are education and experience. Still, other ancillary factors you may not have considered also affect the bottom line.

Education

“Get a good education, get a good job” has long been a mantra for Americans. The belief, ingrained as part of the American Dream, is that getting a four-year degree from a college or university is the way to get ahead in this world. Design is one of those fields in which a bachelor’s degree is, if not exactly essential, at least widely expected from job candidates.

Skills are more likely to be rewarded when it comes to how much you get paid. Thus a certificate from a class that testifies to your proficiency may increase your salary, as every skill you come in with is one that your employer won’t have to teach you. Except for architecture, where a master’s degree is close to being a necessity, graduate education in design isn’t something employers expect. It may backfire and cause employers to hire someone with less education to whom they assume they can pay a smaller salary. With the exceptions of the design fields that require coding ability (such as game design), more experience may stand you in a better light than more education.

Experience

“Salary commensurate with experience” is something job-seekers can expect to see in job postings. Design jobs are no exception; experience is probably essential to have on your resume if you want to earn a higher salary. Employers seek out experienced candidates because experience is a reliable indicator that you know your trade, know how to work in a professional environment, and have demonstrated the skills required to do your job.

Job-seekers are equally familiar with the highly frustrating paradox that you need the experience to get hired, but you need to get hired to gain experience. This is a problem in many design fields, where entry-level jobs requiring two years of experience are expected. One possible solution to the paradox is to garner as much experience as possible by taking on little jobs, even for friends and family, and building a portfolio that way. You can also seek out volunteer jobs or, failing that, spend time on vanity projects that will give you practice showcasing your skills. You'll have to hustle some to get those first opportunities, but you can do more than just cross your fingers about getting hired (or getting a raise) despite your lack of experience.

Industry

Where you work can also affect the numbers on your paycheck. Large companies and corporations have more financial resources than medium- and smaller-sized enterprises, which trickle down to employees. That’s one of the main attractions of working for one of the big firms in your field. Smaller businesses often pay less and expect more, although that’s not an all-out rule of thumb. The same applies pretty much inevitably to not-for-profit organizations, where salary figures suggest that virtue is expected to be its own reward.

Freelancers can set their own rates but only charge what the market will bear. Freelancers generally end up working for smaller businesses, and it’s a simple economic reality that the guy who needs a website for his corner store where he sells apples will pay a designer less than Apple pays one. Still, freelancers have the immeasurable perk of being masters of their own time and captains of their ships. There’s a financial compromise many are willing to make.

Location

Where you work is a factor in how much you make and where you live. Companies in large metropolitan centers will almost always pay more than those in smaller communities. New York City’s cost of living outpaces that of, say, Jacksonville. Thus the larger salaries paid in the former can be gobbled up entirely by a higher cost of living. There’s a vicious cycle involved: the cost of living goes up, salaries go up, and that drives up the cost of living. Thus think twice before seducing yourself with the higher salary figures in the country’s biggest cities.

Specialization

Of course, the secret to earning more is making yourself more valuable to your employer. One way to do that is to possess a skill (or skills) only a few others command. This can be a skill you happen serendipitously to have, or it can be one you can acquire because you’ve perceived a hole in your team’s abilities. Choosing an example at random, there is a need for Graphic Designers who are adept at using Cinema 4D. However, not all Graphic Designers are as they usually concentrate on the Adobe Creative Cloud, so knowing your way around the extra software can be highly beneficial when negotiating a salary.

Pay Range for Designers

According to Indeed.com’s Career Explorer, the average salary for a Graphic Designer is around $55,000 per annum. As expected, some of the highest wages paid to Graphic Designers are in Los Angeles (roughly $64,000) and New York ($60,000). However, Atlanta is a promising outlier with Indeed’s highest annual salary in all cities. Working by states rather than cities, Indeed reports that Massachusetts leads the pack with average salaries 25% above the national average. The other state that reports a large figure is Alaska, but before you stock up on warm clothing, be forewarned that the cost of living in The Last Frontier is 28% higher than the national average. On the other end of the salary spectrum, the lowest-paying states for Graphic Designers are Alabama, South Carolina, and Kentucky. Still, those are also states with lower-than-average living costs. It doesn’t all boil down to the same thing, and there are variations to be borne in mind if you’re looking to relocate, but there is more than a vague correlation between the cost of living and salaries.

Turning to UX Designers, who have more complex toolkits than graphic designers and require greater technical knowledge, their national average salary skims the underside of $100,000. Indeed’s figures here come from a range of wages collected from $69,000 to $164,000 a year. Among states, the results for UX Designers show North Carolina and Virginia as the states with salaries most above the national average (22% and 16%, respectively), and Ohio presenting a demographic oddity with an average UX Designer salary that comes in at 30% lower than the national average.

Choosing a third example that falls between the previous two, Mechanical Designers earn an annual national average salary just south of $60,000, with outliers sitting as far afield as $56,000 and $113,000. The cities reporting the highest average salaries for Drafters are found in two California cities, Fremont (in the Bay Area) and San Diego, where, once again, the gain in compensation will be offset by very high living costs.

Highest-Earning Job Titles for Designers

Not surprisingly, the designer job titles that bring up the highest salaries on Indeed correspond to people with significant experience in their fields. Thus Design Director pulls in a mean salary of nearly $105,000 across the United States, and the broader title of Creative Director has a salary that’s just shy of $100,000. Senior Architects, who aren’t designers per se, but design things for a living, earn even more, with a mean salary of approximately $117,000. For their part, Senior Designers’ mean wages are in the neighborhood of $89,000. Generally, Senior Designer roles go to candidates with at least five years of in-field experience.)

Non-senior design jobs with high salaries are led by UX Designers, whose mean annual salary is nearly $100,000. Also extremely well-paid are Product Designers, who make just north of $90,000. Despite the name, Product Designer, in its current linguistic sense, doesn’t mean people who design physical products (those are known by titles such as Industrial Designer) but is a variant of the UX Designer who specializes in the care and feeding of the design of an app or website after it has been launched. Architects are paid about $89,000 on average, while UI Designers are paid a mean salary of approximately $87,000, notably less than their UX colleagues. The other design title that earns well ahead of the pack is Digital Designer, at just over $82,000. From the previous discussion, the inevitable conclusion is that you can make a lot more money if your design tool is a computer instead of just a pad of paper.

Learn the Skills to Become a Designer at Noble Desktop

If you wish to become a designer, Noble Desktop, a tech and design school based in New York that teaches worldwide thanks to the wonders of the internet, is available to give you the education you need to get started in this exciting field. Noble teaches certificate programs in numerous aspects of design and the technology that makes design possible in the contemporary world. These certificate programs offer comprehensive instruction in their topics and will arm you for the job market in whichever aspect of design interests you.

Noble has certificate programs in graphic design (the Adobe trio of Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator), digital design (the main troika of Adobe programs plus Figma for UI design), UX & UI design, and motion graphics. All these programs feature small class sizes in order to make sure that each student receives ample attention from the instructor, and can be taken either in-person in New York or online from anywhere over the 85% of the Earth’s surface that is reached by the internet (plus the International Space Station.) Classes at Noble Desktop include a free retake option, which can be useful as a refresher course or as a means of maximizing what you learn from fast-paced classes. Noble’s instructors are all experts in their fields and often working professionals whose experience is invaluable when they mentor students in the school’s certificate programs 1-to-1.

Noble offers further design courses that are briefer than the certificate programs. You may also wish to consult Noble’s Learning Hub for a wealth of information on how to learn to be a designer.

Key Takeaways

• There are as many salaries and salary ranges as types of designers.
• In addition to the type of designer you are, factors affecting your earning ability include your level of education and the quantity of experience you possess in the field.
• Other factors include location and any specialized skills you possess.
• Among the highest-paid types of designers are the related highly digital fields of UX Designer, Product Designer, and UI Designer.
• Extensive training for becoming a Digital Designer is available through an in-person or live online course from Noble Desktop.